Models and numerical methods for a suspension of swimming microorganisms: Review

Microorganisms play a vital role in many ecological, environmental and engineering phenomena: Examples include plankton blooms in the oceans and bioreactors for algae fuels. In the last decade, the mathematical models and numerical methods used in this field have improved significantly. In this paper, we review recent advances in the simulation of the individual and collective behaviors of swimming microorganisms, as well as discrete modeling of individual microorganisms for simulating large-scale flow structures. Because we have recently reviewed the biomechanical aspects of suspensions of swimming microorganisms (Ishikawa, 2009), we mainly focus on methodological aspects here.